Abraham Sutzkever, born in 1913 in modern-day Belarus, is a legendary figure of the Yiddish literary world. A survivor of the Vilna Ghetto, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine just before the founding of the State of Israel and passed away in Tel Aviv in 2010, at the age of 96. The poems included here are taken from his 1985 collection Poems from My Diary.

Maia Evrona’s poems, as well as excerpts from her memoir on chronic illness, have appeared in Prairie Schooner, New South and elsewhere. Her translations of Abraham Sutzkever were awarded a 2016 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and have appeared in Poetry. She has written on the importance of the NEA in Artnet.